Getting at the good stuff
Eye-level and off-limits: on excavating the memories of early childhood
Edification – Newsletter #94 – October 31, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday, and happy Halloween if you’re into that!
Lately I’m a going-through-motions holiday celebrant. Halloween is one of those holidays I was stoked for as a child—and between candy and the thrill of going out into the dark in disguise, what’s not to love?—but as I got older, lost interest. Not only am I not superstitious or a fan of horror, I’m also a curmudgeon annoyed by exhibitionists. (Sexy swamp-things, I’m not a fan.)
But the spark returned with kids of my own. On Friday night I got to take my little ones on their first real trick-or-treat and witness the exhilaration of tiny spooks, first candies rattling into the buckets, the courage of a three-year-old saying “thank you” to a neighbor. It was good. Holidays are good. People are good.
And now we can get on with the real business of winter holidays involving desserts and hunkering under blankets looking at lights. I’m a primitive. Grok want fatty food and fire. Grok no like swamp-things.
In writing this week, I’ve had two pieces published. One is a poem in Olney Magazine about Ohio and love. It’s called “The Heart of It All,” which used to be the state’s tourism motto when I was a kid. Any bridge you crossed had that sign welcoming you.
My poem begins with another classic Ohio-ism, the joke “What’s high in the middle and round on both sides?” (Answer being the word O-Hi-O, get it?)
What’s high in the middle and round on both sides?
Me on a motorcycle spinning through Ohio
thinking about how many have said they loved me
without knowing what that’s in spite of
Read the whole thing here. I wrote the poem thinking about Tom Petty, that particular “heartland rock” that reminds you of driving a state highway through corn country, the jerkwater towns of the Midwest, the rhythm of freight trains. Music is a constant muse.
The other piece is a flash called “As Solid As an Ashtray and Emits More Smoke,” published in Fractured Literary. This is an excerpt from a chapter in my forthcoming novel. The chapter itself is called “Objects of Early Childhood,” and it examines ashtrays, old refrigerators, chemicals, weapons. The items around a house that are eye-level to a small child and yet forbidden. (Forbidden as the other things that “emit smoke,” like the mental trauma of parents caused by the Vietnam war, for example.)
I wrote this one as an exercise in memoir excavation. There’s a kind of self-mesmerism involved in extracting very old memories from the brain, and I think it comes through in this piece. I begin with a flash, an image, a smell, a sound. What do I remember?
In this instance, it was an ashtray shaped like a frying pan. These were common sights when I was young (you can find them on eBay, if you have never seen them at flea markets). In fact, ashtrays were ubiquitous across every room of my childhood home. On the kitchen table, on the back of the toilet, on the bed. And yet it was understood they were not to be touched. Their significance to a small child is in their off-limits character. The world of adults – and their emotional lives which often drove their impulse to smoke – was off-limits, too. Inaccessible and yet right there in my face. Like an ashtray.
Have you ever tried writing a story or recollection from the sensory fragments you have in your earliest memories? Even if you never do anything with it, I recommend giving it a try. It’s a bit like fiddling with a stuck door at the back of your brain. You might jiggle it open and find a lot more than you thought you had stashed in there.
This week I was revising my book and thinking more on the topic of my newsletter last week, answering the “why me?” of making art. I’ve been reflecting on the ways in which my upbringing, which was both a common experience and a singular one, made me the right one to tell the stories I tell.
My background, my brain, my current situation. I think once I started to dig down into the confluence of those things, my writing started feeling more “right.” Things started clicking into place.
It started with small stories, wedging my fingers into the cracks and prying the door open. Now I’m holding it open with my foot. Will it last? How much is in there? Will I look back and say, “Honey, you were barely aware”? Maybe.
But even as I move on from stories rooted in my early experiences, it’s important to me to try holding onto that “why me” feeling of rightness. My current book has a character in middle age dealing with a teenaged son in crisis. Again, drawing from life. She is prone to flightiness. She’s clumsy. She misses obvious signs even though she’s smart and cares a lot. I feel at home in her brain and there’s a “mesmerized” sensation I get as I write. It feels right.
I think writers should consider what makes their voice ring truest for them. It’s not that artists should deliberately strive to be different – they’re already different because they’re artists – but that they should do some digging and answer their own “why mes.” I think that’s where the good stuff waits.
Talk soon,
Edie
Getting at the good stuff
I love my Sunday mornings with you, Edie. I always have your voice and that of Tommy Euland's in my Sunday morning inbox.
This week I especially loved the piece about ashtrays. I, too, grew up with ashtrays all over the house. Mom's cigarette butts had red lipstick on them. These sentences sum it up so beautifully: "It is an ashtray. That’s all it is, and I don’t want it. “You don’t want that,” Momma has told me many times, so I try not to."
Why you? Because I need to read your stories.